Is Everything More Delicious When You Eat With Your Hands?

Thursday, April 10, 2014

My wife Meera and I often have non-Indian guests over for dinner – typically a sumptuous Indian meal that she makes.

Everyone digs into their rice and daal, hariyali chicken and prawn curry with silverware. Then my daughter clears her throat and quietly asks if she can please just eat with her hands.

And why wouldn't she? She's now 12 and has mostly grown up in Queens, the most diverse patch of land in the known universe. She's as comfortable taking a ham sandwich to school as steamed idlis with coconut chutney.

To her, a fork isn't a sign of Western cultural superiority; it's a nuisance and serves no useful function in an Indian meal. Hand-eating is what we do.

So invariably my wife and I exchange a quick glance and give her the A-OK. Eventually I started following my kid's lead, thinking, "Well, if she can eat with her hands, why the hell can't I?"

And then, a couple weeks ago, I decided it was time for me, finally, to hand-eat in public.

Many Indians today eat breads — chapatis, parathas, naans — with their hands, but stick to utensils for rice. But hand-eating is the real deal: A set of fingers, after all, is infinitely more nimble than a set of metal tines, far better equipped to pry the spines out of a fish molee.

Indian mothers like to feed their babies by hand. And there is really nothing in the world as tasty as a ball of food fed to you at any age by your mother. Its composition is perfectly and instinctively calibrated by her fingers — a precise combination of rice and sambar, or stir-fried plantain and a couple flecks of papadom. And, of course, lots of ghee.

My mom once explained to my teenage self that the secret was biochemical: The subtle oils of her fingers imparted some sort of alchemy to the little sphere — a pheromonal cocktail, I suppose — that would only fully blossom in the mouth of her offspring. Others would just call it maternal love.

But as we got older, we mostly kept our hand-eating ways to ourselves. I grew up in Texas in the 70s and 80s and didn't want to be thought of as some kind of culinary barbarian, the Indian kid who ate like a third-world savage. Classmates who tried to get invited over to my place represented a potential threat.

It's only in recent years that I noticed how outdated this attitude was.

As an Indian friend of mine says, forks make you look colonized. So I decided, finally, to hand-eat in public, and found a public atrium on Wall Street for my big debut. (I made a video about it, too, for my WNYC series Micropolis.)

I chose a fish thaali from Anjappar, a great restaurant in the Murray Hill neighborhood, featuring food from the Chettinaad region of South India. As I plunged my hand into the pile of rice and fish curry and some thin, tangy rasam, I expected a couple stares at the least.

Instead a couple old men approached me and asked for Indian restaurant recommendations — deeply anticlimactic. But I actually enjoyed my meal and figure it's now worth an encore, perhaps at a fine-dining establishment near you.

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Arun Venugopal is a reporter and the creator of Micropolis, WNYC’s multi-platform series examining race, sexuality, religion, street life and other issues that define New York City. He has been with the station since 2005, and has covered a wide range of stories, including the death of Sean Bell, the controversy over the Park 51 mosque and community center and Occupy Wall Street .

Comments [2]

We eat non-indian foods as any other person would eat it :) We eat the pasta and chile with forks and spoons and not that I eat ribs that much, but I would probably eat that with my hands because it's just easier--same with chicken wings.Try to put newspaper under your 5 year old's plate and perhaps some napkins under his chin.

My wife and I were intrigued by the article (we are not Indian). We noticed that you were talking about making balls of rice, and eating the bread with your hands. But, how do you (or other Indian's) eat non-Indian foods when in your house? Do you eat pasta with your hands? Or chile? How do you eat ribs (Ok, I know this is a conditional question as many Indian's are vegetarians)?Our kids would love the idea of this, but do you keep 5 year old's from from being a complete mess? How? Or do you just let them just make a mess?

Thanks for sharing, I thought it was a great story! Not sure we will start eating with our hands, but we'll probably be more flexible with our kids eating with their hands. Maybe we'll try some foods that go well with rice and give it a go every so often.

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